October 2008 Area User Group Meetings

October is here, and the crispness of Fall is in the air. Before you know it, Halloween will be here. But even sooner than that is the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008 in Los Angeles, CA! I’m looking forward to heading to LA myself in a couple of weeks. This promises to be an exciting PDC!

It seems every other day the PDC website leaks out a few more teasers on what’s coming. Looks like there will be lots of information on cloud services, mobile development, and the future of the Windows platform, namely, Windows “7”. All conference attendees will receive a 160GB hard drive packed full of all sorts of goodies, including the first pre-beta bits of Windows 7! Registration is still open at www.microsoftpdc.com, but it’s getting close to selling out. So if you haven’t already, sign up and book your ticket to sunny southern California!

Last month was an active one in the NY Metro area tech community. VSLive! came to Brooklyn with lots of great .NET developer content. Then, Web 2.0 Expo came to NYC at the Javits Center. Microsoft had a spot on the expo floor showing off the new Microsoft Surface, as well as other cool stuff including Silverlight and MS AJAX.

Don’t forget about your local community user groups! Microsoft events only come to town once and a while. But user groups meet in the evenings on a monthly basis throughout the area. There are over 25 groups in our metro area! These are all free opportunities to come out and mingle with your peers after work, eat free pizza, and learn about new technologies from experts in the field.

In September, two new user groups met for the first time. On the 25th a good crowd came out for the inaugural NYC Alt.NET user group (http://nyalt.net ). Congrats to Steve Bohlen, Yitzchok Gottlieb, Alex Hung, Dan Berlin, and others for helping kick off the group. The crowd stayed past 9pm actively discussing pros & cons of Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tools and frameworks in a “fishbowl” format. And on 9/30, the NYC VSTS User group (http://nyc-vsts-ug.com ) will host their first meeting too.